City investing in new online ambassador

Published: Saturday, March 29, 2014 at 06:45 PM.

PANAMA CITY
— The city’s frontline for visitors will undergo a complete makeover in the coming months.

Over three years, the city will spend $34,673 for what
Panama City
officials called a “long overdue” upgrade to their online ambassador: the city’s website. Commissioners unanimously approved the funds during their most recent March meeting for Icon Enterprise’s CivicPlus, a government content management system, to manage aspects of the city’s online presence.

In an age when 94.8 percent of households have means to access the Internet, according to 2012
U.S.
census figures, the struggle to entice business or residents to an area can be won or lost on a homepage.

“If they have a computer in front of them, they will usually type in
Panama City
just to see what the website looks like,” said
Mike Lane
, the city’s director of business recruitment. “It isn’t the best marketing tool we could come up with and we’ve had to contend with that.”

Since 2012, unique visitors of the city’s website has increased by 60,000 to a total of about 379,000 people in 2013, according to city IT officials. And that trend is not expected decline.

People pushing to upgrade the city’s web facilities struggled with selling the concept to elected officials who would be accountable for spending several thousand dollars on a website. However, the idea was finally feasible when department heads could show it was not only hindering economic progress but also detrimental to sharing public information with residents, according to IT Director Richard Ferrick.

“It was not serving citizens the way it should,” Ferrick said. “It’s hard to navigate with the service we are using, and if you don’t know what you are looking for it can really get confusing.”

PANAMA CITY — The city’s frontline for visitors will undergo a complete makeover in the coming months.

Over three years, the city will spend $34,673 for what Panama City officials called a “long overdue” upgrade to their online ambassador: the city’s website. Commissioners unanimously approved the funds during their most recent March meeting for Icon Enterprise’s CivicPlus, a government content management system, to manage aspects of the city’s online presence.

In an age when 94.8 percent of households have means to access the Internet, according to 2012 U.S. census figures, the struggle to entice business or residents to an area can be won or lost on a homepage.

“If they have a computer in front of them, they will usually type in Panama City just to see what the website looks like,” said Mike Lane, the city’s director of business recruitment. “It isn’t the best marketing tool we could come up with and we’ve had to contend with that.”

Since 2012, unique visitors of the city’s website has increased by 60,000 to a total of about 379,000 people in 2013, according to city IT officials. And that trend is not expected decline.

People pushing to upgrade the city’s web facilities struggled with selling the concept to elected officials who would be accountable for spending several thousand dollars on a website. However, the idea was finally feasible when department heads could show it was not only hindering economic progress but also detrimental to sharing public information with residents, according to IT Director Richard Ferrick.

“It was not serving citizens the way it should,” Ferrick said. “It’s hard to navigate with the service we are using, and if you don’t know what you are looking for it can really get confusing.”

Ferrick has been the city’s in-house web manager since the last upgrade in 2008, which he designed with static HTML pages. The functions offered on the CivicPlus managed website will include an agenda center for public meetings, content library, bid contract and bid rewards, public record request tools and several other municipal web applications.

“The end result is all these documents will be stored on the web and accessible by the public from their desk top,” Ferrick said. “To me, it’s worth it.”

To spawn interest from developers and home buyers, Lane is pursuing a listing of all real estate available in the city, along with photos and other interactive features.

“You have to have something that is appealing,” Lane said. “If you have a decent website, it looks like you have pride in your city.”

How the Panama City homepage will be laid out is yet to be determined, but Ferrick said input from businesses, residents and property owners will be taken into account when prioritizing the website’s features.